James Ford Rhodes (18481927). History of the Civil War, 18611865 1917.

Page 384

Northern armies. A weighty recommendation that conscription be given up and volunteering resorted to again to recruit the army, and the fact that there were 100,000 deserters, are not reasons for condemning the Confederate policy of conscription, but they are among the many indications that the Southern cause was lost.

The Confederacy was practically supported, in so far as its strictly defined financial operations were concerned, by the issue of paper money and from the proceeds of bonds which were paid for in the paper currency; in this medium the holders of the bonds received their interest. Owing to the stringency of the blockade the revenue derived from the export duty on cotton and from duties on imports was inconsiderable. No large amount of money was raised by internal taxation. An attempt to maintain specie payments would have been futile: $27,000,000 is an outside estimate of the receipts in specie of the Confederate government during its life of four years. Before the end of 1863, $700,000,000 of Treasury notes were in circulation and this amount was increased during the next year to $1,000,000,000, but the issues grew so enormously that apparently no exact amount of them was made public; it is even possible that the Treasury Department itself did not know the amount afloat. But this was not the extent of the inflation of the currency. The different States issued State Treasury notes; the banks expanded their circulation; Richmond, Charleston and other cities put out municipal treasury bills; railroad, turnpike and insurance companies, factories and savings-banks added to the mass of paper money. A large part of this municipal and corporation paper was issued in denominations below one dollar to supply the need for small change caused by the disappearance of fractional